Thursday, February 25, 2016

Ted Cruz Outraises Rubio In Super Tuesday States

In their battle to become Donald Trump’s chief rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has held one big advantage over Florida Sen. Marco Rubio: money.

Cruz entered this month with $13.6 million in available cash, more than twice the amount stockpiled in Rubio’s account, new reports show. More than 40% of Cruz’s January donations came from small donors he can tap repeatedly for contributions, compared with 19% of Rubio’s contributions.

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But in perhaps the strongest measure of Cruz’s outreach to early voting states, the Texas senator outraised Rubio in the 11 states that will stage Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses next week, a USA TODAY analysis of new campaign-finance reports shows.

In January, Cruz collected more than $1.8 million from these states, many of them clustered in the South. By comparison, donors from those states gave less than half that amount — about $774,000 — to Rubio’s campaign last month.

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Over the entire election cycle, Cruz has raised more than three times the amount that Rubio has collected from the March 1 states.

Cruz vastly outperformed Rubio in his donor-rich home state of Texas, which accounted for more than two-thirds of the money Cruz raised in January from the Super Tuesday states. But he also raised more money than Rubio in seven others, including Tennessee, Oklahoma and Georgia — all with the sizable populations of the evangelical voters Cruz has courted assiduously in his White House quest.